While traveling the other day, I came across an article in the June 13th edition of Bloomberg Businessweek entitled “.” The article touches on how the financial services industry, and particularly larger universal Banks, must figure out ways to spur performance in a struggling economy with fewer jobs and a tighter regulatory environment. Currently, elevated capital cushion requirements, stricter liquidity guidelines, , and the disbanding of proprietary trading units are shrinking Bank profits. For instance, the article reveals that as of March 31, 2011, 29.3 percent of U.S. corporate profits for the previous 12 months came from financial firms; this number is drastically below the industry’s 41.7 percent peak recorded for the 12 months prior to September 30, 2002. Moreover, stubbornly low interest rates and declining loan volumes are crimping revenues and fee and interest income. For example, the article references Bloomberg research, which projects that, as of the end of Q2 2011, the six largest U.S. lending banks will experience a decline of 3.7 percent in net revenues. This year-over-year fall will actually be the fourth in the past five quarters. As a result of these challenges, financial services jobs in the U.S. in May 2011 came in at just 7.61 million, which is more than 8.4 percent lower than the record high total in 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Furthermore, this figure has unfortunately declined for the past four years. Complicating matters, many analysts feel that the aforementioned increasing costs, declining yields, and slow growth could result in even more cutbacks on Wall Street over the next few months.
What really caught my eye in the article, though, was how many of these Banks are adjusting and fine-tuning their strategy as they strive to right the ship both here and abroad:
“In an effort to boost revenue, banks are shifting their focus back to bread-and-butter businesses, such as retail banking, brokerage services, and asset management. They are dusting off a once-favored strategy, cross-selling – persuading existing customers to buy additional products.”
Of course, in order to cross-sell more effectively, these Banks need to have a well-defined CRM strategy in place. Banks providing producers and sales personnel with proprietary solutions or antiquated systems for CRM will get left behind and see their retail, brokerage, and institutional customers defect. Banks allowing any of their customer-facing employees to rely on exclusive personal notes or lists that are not shared or available to anyone else will also lose large-sized deals and market share. To implement a more aggressive cross-selling initiative, Banks need to arm their staff with a centralized, scalable, and flexible enterprise CRM system, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, that can integrate with other core technology offerings and work directly within the vastly familiar Outlook email application. Having a full CRM Sales, Service, and Marketing suite will give bankers, advisors, deal-makers, and relationship managers a broad, comprehensive view of a customer’s accounts, transactions, and interaction history. CRM 2011 will enable all Bank colleagues and departments to collaborate more effectively and share client opportunities, feedback, and concerns. Regardless of Banking channel touch point, employees can leverage CRM 2011 to capture actionable details on a client’s current and future product and service needs and analyze the relationship’s lifetime value potential. Having such customer insights and business intelligence readily accessible is a true competitive advantage. It allows sales and service reps to be more prepared to recommend the appropriate cross-sell and up-sell recommendation in order to address a client’s entire financial situation. Closing ratios will increase, client relationships will deepen, and client loyalty will be preserved and strengthened. In turn, Bank revenues will increase, and hopefully offset rising costs, thus satisfying employees, shareholders, stakeholders, and partners.
Customer Effective has tailored the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 platform for top-tier Banking institutions and positioned them to increase cross-selling success to win more banking business from their customers. To learn more about how CRM 2011 can help you boost revenues to overcome rising regulatory costs and a steady low interest rate environment, please visit .
Post by: Kevin Wessels, Customer Effective, Florida, Georgia Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner
That ia a good idea with the help of CRM it is easy to cross sell the products and generate more revenue.
Kevin - Let me echo your sentiment in this posting. As a provider of document imaging software for banks, we too are seeing an increased interest by banks to streamline workflow and operations. Both CRM and imaging platforms help banks achieve these goals by making things more efficient and improving productivity of their staff. Many of our clients ask us about CRM integration. Do you know of any program that Microsoft has for integration with their CRM platform? Just curious - thanks!
I am the marketing director at a small community bank. I recently came to work here and off the bat can tell that one of our biggest concerns is cross-selling our products. Our new accounts people do a great job of catering to our customers needs when it comes to new accounts, but the problem is, we may never see that customer again until they need more checks or they've lost their debit card, etc. So our best time to cross sell is when they are in the bank. After reading your article, I decided to look a little more into some kind of software that could help us establish a CRM, thus help us cross-sell some of our loan and CD products with our new account products. Any advice or recommendations you could make on a particular software would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Hi Brad. Thanks for your interest in the article. Our Director of CRM Banking Solutions sent you a follow-up email last week and can certainly help you explore your options and improve your cross-selling initiatives. Please let me know if you need anything else.